Tithe to Tartarus: The Dark Avenger's Sidekick Book Three (Moth & Cobweb 6)

by John C. Wright

  “Ham?” asked Yumiko, wondering if she had missed a comment.

  “There is an ancient race that lives among Christian and Paynim that often hides their lineage. They were told the secret name of God, and for this reason all other races hold them in jealousy and suspicion, and every few years mobs rise up in fury and butcher them without cause. And they cannot eat ham.”

  Yumiko said, “Let us save the bridegroom first before planning the reception.”

  “Why? He is not going to have any say in the matter.”

  Yumiko said, “Because there is another thing to discuss first. You say the City of Corpses is in Queens. How do you know? And why were the Anarchists after you? For that matter, why did you come here?”

  “Here on the elevated train? To make the bus connection at Lexington.”

  “Here in the Daylight World.”

  2. The Book of Ayre

  Elfine told her story:

  “Before his exile to Troynovant, my father once took me aloft in a hot-air balloon at the summer fair in Cranston, which is nigh to the northernmost lighthouse on the Isle of Man. He showed me a book he had brought aloft with him, a precious book that could only be read on holy mountains or at high altitudes, far above the Mists of Everness, for the ink was starlight, and each page glowed and shined. It was a very old book, for the last chapters were written in Greek, and before that, in Mycenaean, Voynich script, runes, and hieroglyphs, and the oldest parts were plates showing the dancing men of the cave painting script of Bhimbetka.

  “He had me trace the letters and repeat the staves. Now, all the older elf generations suffer no loss of memory, and so they never inscribe words and letters save to cast a spell. This spell was to imprint into my memory words neither age, nor chants, nor drugs, nor mists, nor time could ever make fade.”

  And Elfine sang these words:

  “The great creator made his creations with a love of creation. But none can make who is not made free. Freeborn were born each tongue and tribe and nation. Creation is marred by marring order, balance, harmony; but none can love who loves not freely.

  “Justice miscarries, and mercy goes astray when love, true love, has not its proper say.

  “Free are we to know life and bliss; free to know death and woe; free to ascend to the joys endless, free to fall into darkness below. The lonely soul, alone, lacks power to fly. The lonely soul, alone, has power to die.

  “Truly alone is none; even the One who is One alone is Three in One.”

  Yumiko said, “I don’t understand.”

  Elfine said, “Ayre Moth saw what happened to my ninety-nine sisters. Father did not want that to happen to me.”

  “What happened?”

  “I told you this part. Did you forget? To swear the oath of fealty all Twilight swears to Night, which renders rebellion impossible. But some Moths have found a way not to swear. That is why I want to find my cousins. To find out how they did it.”

  3. Aboard the Ironclad

  “Do you want to know how I smuggled my way into New York? I was quite clever about it. After father was exiled to Troynovant, he brought his library with him, and I read detective stories from the human world. Humans cannot simply enchant one another to get what they want, so they commit crime and they fight crime in ways the elfs don’t know to watch for.

  “My opportunity came when Erlkoenig had returned to Troynovant for the Wintertide Court. Snow buried the fields and roads in honor of his coming, and all the trees and towertops were white and bright with ice beneath the moon. The whole city was alarmed with the rumor that one of the ancient vampires of the Northbrood was at large. The Northbrood can drain a man’s life as a basilisk can, merely with the fell light of his eyes, drinking not a drop of blood. It was Monday of the Anarchists, the Lord of Vampires.

  “He was gathering barghests and cooshee and other hounds of elfland and offering to turn them into werewolves, to give them the bodies to wear of humans who were kinslayers.

  “Tongues wagged, and rumors flew when the Winterking did not ask his own champion, or any of his own knights, to hunt down the Vampire Lord. Instead, the Winterking called upon Sir Bertolac the Golden, the Summer Champion, to hunt through the city and the coasts round about to discover the vampire’s nest, or the hideout and smuggler’s cove of the werewolves. It was thought that Erlkoenig did not wish to involve his own knights either because he did not trust them to be willing to overcome the Vampire Lord or, worse, did not trust that they were able. Nothing would darken their repute if Alberec’s knight failed.

  “But the Summer Knight did not use proper modern police methods. He just did not read pulp magazines, I guess, or get a proper modern education like mine.

  “Well, I could work undercover where he could not! It was not hard for me to find a pack of whist hounds of the low and villainous sort, scofflaws and scoundrels. I kept pulling the tails of the horses of the knights or men-at-arms following Sir Bertolac, trying to get their steeds to buck them into the mud, or dropping beehives dripping with honey onto their helmets. One knight chased me right into the den of some bad hounds. And when those bad hounds got into dog fights with other packs, I went with whichever of the two was worse! So I wormed my way deeper and deeper into the dog underground.”

  Yumiko said, “So easily?”

  “It was not easy. It took a long time. But I am close enough to fairy blood to pass for one. No one knows I have a memory. No one bothered to watch his mouth around me. So I soon heard where and when the Vampire Lord was recruiting his dogs. I do not need to give off light when I am small: I just do that to show lightheartedness, which helps with levity.

  “I followed the first dog, and lost track of him, and then a second, and lost him also, but the third led me into a cave south of the city where there were a dock and rowboats waiting.

  “With them were shabti, the men of clay brought to life by Egyptian magic. They can neither speak nor think nor betray. With muffled oars and smothered lamps, they rowed out into the bay. Below us in the deep was a giant manta ray, coated from wingtip to wingtip, mouth to tail, in armor. And it had a narwhal horn or lance it used to tear holes in ships.

  “But it was not armor. This was a machine, large as any galleon or schooner, and there was nothing like it in the Night World. Its horn was no tooth but a ramming prow.

  “I knew the Day Men had submersible vessels, but none like this. It was a thing of Twilight. It may make me sound bad, but my heart leaped when I saw it. I had always been told that I was second best, a dim copy of an elf. And here was something the elf world did not have.

  “It was neither a motor vessel of the Day nor a magical galleon of the Night. It was a magical motor vessel. It was ours.

  “The iron was scary, but I was able to keep away from it. Most of the ship was made of wood or copper or brass. Once I was aboard, I made friends with some rats living in the hold, and the rat’s nests were in the wooden decks, not the iron hull. Not friends, exactly. I helped the rats pilfer food, and they did not eat me. They helped me. I could tell when someone was coming long before I saw or heard anything because the rats would get all stiff and quivery.

  “This ship was the biggest machine I had ever seen, and the sound of turning wheels and terrible energies was always in the air. The decks were lit with gaslight. I crept along corners during the dog watch, looking.

  “I saw the great brass wheel the helmsman used to steer and the two ports like eyes in the conning tower that showed the black waters streaming by overhead.

  “I saw the smaller, eight-man submarine gunboats like remoras clinging to the sides of the ship, inside half-shells that could be pumped full of water or air to allow them to come and go at will.

  “I saw the galley and the workrooms and engines, the bunks for the men, the quarters for the officers.

  “Once I crept into the captain’s cabin, and I saw Monday, the Vampire Lord, in his high-collared black cloak and wide-brimmed black hat, playing Mozart’s Requiem on the pipe organ.
He was playing Dies Irae. Sadness was in his terrible eyes, and he did not hear me, and turn, and look at me, and kill me. After that, I stuck to the rat’s nest.

  “Under the sea is the perfect place for him to hide. You would think more vampires would take advantage of it. There is no sunlight in the deep, not way down below the continental shelf, and even if the air bottles failed, he would be safe.

  “Once we fought with a great squid. The ship rammed the monster and ran it through with our prow, but it wrapped the hull with its tentacles, and the hullplates groaned. We shocked it with lightning from the ram, but it did not let go. We blew all ballast and rose to the surface into a tempest, dragging it up with us, and all its phosphorescent skin turned red with anger. The captain, a fierce, red-faced man with an iron hand named Saturday, sent out stout sailors with harpoons to battle the beast. The ship’s mast was struck by lightning, and this recharged the weapons enough to slay the beast. The great corpse was lashed to the starboard side of the ship. During the watches that followed, we sailed on the surface while the corpse was flayed and butchered. The sailors had to drive the sharks away.

  “Another time, we were pursued by a tall, strange vessel that showed no running lights, flew no flag, and moved without sail or screw or wheel. We dove, but she sank and followed us. Down and down into a crevasse in the sea we went and lost sight of her.

  “We put in for a week at Back Cup Island, where they have a dock and shipyard hidden in the crater lake of a dead volcano cone. We took on water and supplies, including pineapples, and men let the dogs out six at a time to be exercised. But I was not discovered.

  “How the ironclad submersible got around the Great Wall of Mist between the Third and Second Hemisphere, I do not know. Maybe we dived under it while we were sailing under the ice cap.

  “All I know is that one day, there was a lot of noise and banging and carrying on. The sailors were cursing like sailors. I could smell fresh air. So I hid in a crate and waited for it to be unloaded.

  “I peeked out and saw we had made port. I saw the man ordering the shabti around. He was tall and dressed like a pharaoh, in white linen, wearing a gold death-mask to hide his face, and a pschent covered his hair. He had both men of clay and of wood to serve him, and he ordered them with gestures of the flail or the crosier he had in his hands. His mask spoke for him, but he never spoke. Men called him Wednesday of the Anarchists, or Lord of Mummies.

  “The whole vast dockyard and kennel warehouse were underground, but I flew up through a vent. Guess where? Bedloe’s Island.”

  Yumiko said, “I am afraid I do not know where that is.”

  “It is the one the Statue of Liberty is on.”

  The first shipment point was LIs. It was not a Roman numeral for fifty-one. It was an abbreviation for Liberty Island. Yumiko was startled, “How can this be? There are tourists. The island—how big is it?”

  “Fourteen acres. But they could have had mermaids help them hollow out the caves beneath, in which case it might be bigger on the inside than it looks on the outside. And if you have a base buried in the bedrock below the river, what does it matter how big the island is above it?”

  “But the tourists! And the police! How can you run a smuggler’s shipyard right under the toes of a famous monument?”

  “What makes you think the police do not all work for the Anarchists? The tourists could all be actors or wax dummies just pretending to be tourists. All their bases have to be in famous spots. In case they are discovered. It makes it harder for the elfs to erase all memory of the place from everyone’s mind.”

  Yumiko remembered Ruff saying the same thing about organizing a duel on the Brooklyn Bridge. “It seems insolent. A monument to liberty hiding anarchists.”

  Elfine shrugged. “If you ask them, the Anarchists will say they like liberty, all the liberty, and nothing but liberty.”

  “What happened next?”

  “There is not much more to tell. I hid in a crate with a whist hound with red ears named Shuck. We talked, or, actually, I played dumb, and he talked. He seemed to think eating a man and taking his place, his memories and so on, would be great.

  “The human involved—if Shuck was right—apparently thought he was going to get werewolf powers, something he could take on and off like a cloak, and no one told him that he was just going to be possessed by a dark spirit and be the horse carrying a rider.

  “Our crate was hauled in the back of a truck to an underground place full of dead rats that smelled horrible. Then, two days went by while some men took Shuck out of the box and did horrible things to him. I think the men were Cobwebs.

  “I flew out once or twice and looked around, but there was evil, powerful evil, all over the place, and the doors were locked without even a keyhole for me to slip thorough. I was hungry.

  “So I just hid in the crate, and then on the next day, Shuck was shoved back in. He was kind of dazed and not talkative. Men moved the crate to a truck and then to the cemetery.

  “I got out of the truck before it actually passed the gate and went onto holy ground. I was still curious, though, so after a bath and a meal made of bird’s eggs, I went back to the cemetery gate. I could see them on the hilltop in the distance. They were still unloading. I waited for the same truck to go back out through the gate. This time I just followed it from the air, or I hung on to the antenna and let it pull me.

  “It went to a place that dogs like Shuck might like: gambling and swearing and lots of drinking hard liquor. I kind of liked it because it had humans and half-bloods and elfs all in the same place, just laughing and losing money and dancing. Everyone was getting along! It was just what I had heard America was like.

  “I poked around, and I fiddled with the roulette wheel so it would spin better, and then I talked to the house hob and paid my respects.

  “He gave me an idea on a nice place to stay while I was in the city since he said I could pass for a human, too. I asked him about the underwater ship, and he said its name was Nautilus. He seemed really interested, and I told him all about her. I asked him about my cousins, and he said they would be coming by the Friday after next, so why shouldn’t I stick around?

  “But I said, no, I did not want to do that. And then a pumpkin and some evil men tried to catch me to make me stick around.

  “And I almost got away, but I did not. I ran outside, but one of them snared me. And then you came down out of the night sky wrapped in the American flag to save me!”

  4. The Angels Stopped Coming

  They walked from the train station to the bus stop. Yumiko wore her black trench coat with the collar turned up and the cowl tucked away. She hid her mask in a cloak pocket, which she turned into a sash and wore about her waist. She bought a green poncho from a street vendor selling umbrellas and rain hats and gave it to Elfine in the hope that the blonde half-fairy would be less conspicuous. Elfine declared that she loved her gift and ran excitedly down the sidewalk, flapping her arms to make the poncho fabric flutter.

  They took the bus across the Queensboro Bridge past Sunnyside to Flushing. Yumiko found seats in the back, hoping to avoid attention. Elfine swung from one hand-strap to the next and led the bus driver and passengers in singing a rousing chorus of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and then “We Are off to See the Wizard”.

  The girls got off at Roosevelt and 51st in Flushing. Elfine waved goodbye to the bus driver and to every passenger whose child had recently lost a tooth, whose names, for some reason, she knew.

  They walked for ten minutes or so. The immense green slopes of the cemetery were visible in the near distance, dotted with headstones, obelisks, monuments, and mausoleums. The skyline of famous buildings rose across the water, looking ominously like a larger version of the same scene.

  “No skipping when we enter the graveyard,” warned Yumiko. “And no singing show tunes! I was surprised you did not get knifed by the big boy in the ball cap. The BAM shaved into his skull is his gang sign.”

  “He had a
nice baritone! Katie Casey was baseball mad! Had the fever and had it bad! Besides, even the worst man was once a baby, and every baby can see the fairies who come to dance around his crib.”

  Yumiko glanced at Elfine sidelong. “Why do fairies dance around cribs?”

  “Newborns tell us news of the paradise in whose gardens they were so recently formed. But then they grow up, lose the second sight, forget paradise, and forget us.” Elfine sighed wistfully and pouted. “The world is so sad! Men would be happier if you could just remember things.”

  “There is little hope of that, in my case,” said Yumiko without expression. “But I will gather up what broken fragments of my life as I may and save my love.” She shrugged, smiled at Elfine, and spoke again. “Strange that you say ‘us’ and ‘you.’ You talk as if you are a fairy and I am a human, but we are both Moths. Both half-and-half.”

  Elfine scowled and stamped her foot. “And the other fairies in Garlot’s bottles never let me forget it! They teased me! They were so mean! Just because I am not as dainty and fine as they are! And they were always surprised to see me the next morning, and so they said the same mean things again! For three weeks!”

  Yumiko nodded and put a gentle hand on the other girl’s shoulder. “I never got over finding out that I am not full-blooded Japanese. I must resign myself to the shame.”

  “Shame?”

  “Of being a mongrel. Of having mixed blood.”

  Elfine giggled and clapped her hands. “But you don’t have to worry about that any more! This is America! We are in America. Here, it does not matter what you were born. It only matters what you make of yourself. That is why I came. My Dad says it is insane for elfs to boast about being pure-bloods, considering.”

  “Considering what?”

  “Considering where they come from. The Night Folk, before the Great Flood, could change their appearance, size, and hue, so you could not tell who was what except by how he acted. Back then, there was no big difference between elfs and efts and pooka and sprites, except one looked after men, and the others looked after fires or fauna or flowers.”